Push Notifications in Blackberry

Question

I developed a Blackberry Native application and now the client want notifications even when the device is turned-off. After a few searching, Blackberry Push Service seems the way to go, but i have some concerns:

1. Blackberry Push Service is a free or paid service?
2. What are the library requirements on the client side? Do I need additional libraries or it only work with Blackberry SDK?
3. How are the notifications sent? Do I need to build an additional application for that? The client has IIS servers, so I wanna know if it is possible to build such an application in .NET.
4. Have any one tried Urban Airship? Seems like a simpler way to accomplish the task.

Answer 1

1. RIM charges for Push services based on how much data you are pushing through their servers, and for delivery confirmation. If your customer base is small, and the push data requirements are modest they won't charge anything.

2. When you register to start a push service they will send you sample code but there are no additional library requirements.

3. Push notifications are XML documents that are POSTed to a RIM 'web' server. There are a number of services you must provide to the client for registration and push control. The standard way of doing this is again with a 'web' server that RIM and the client device communicate with. When you register RIM will send you a sample server module designed to run in Apache TomCat, but I (and others) have replicated the necessary capability on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP servers (LAMPS). I don't see any reason you could not implement this on IIS but I have no experience with IIS. (I put 'web' in quotes because this server may, but does not have to, serve any web pages in the traditional sense. The push service uses HTTPS as the transport protocol.)

4. I don't even know what that is.

If your client is running a BES then they already have everything they need to push to the client and get delivery confirmation without any additional cost. JP Mens published a very good article on using the BES MDS server to push data to clients from a LAMPS machine.